Emacs Dired “Shortcuts”

I’m always trying to make my development workflow more efficient – whether it be tools or process – and this post solved one of my recent pain points – as well as giving me another practical problem to solve with Lisp.

As I noted previously, I’m really heavy into Emacs use at the moment: development, calendaring, RSS, news, Jabber IM – all from within this awesome thing called Emacs.

As I started to use it more and more for all types of different chores – and more specific to this post – file editing, I began to notice fairly quickly that directory navigation with Dired (Ctrl-X d, by default) led to far too many keystrokes to get to disparate locations – and to boot there was no notion of persistent “favorites” or “shortcuts”.

The above may just be my newness to the Emacs ecosystem and the functionality may actually exist – but it never turned up in my many searches. So I went about providing my own solution.

NOTE: This effort had no intention of making handy-dandy menu items as I don’t like them – or the mouse for that matter – all that much. Maybe I’ll add that at some point for thoroughness sake – we’ll see.

The plan was simple:

Create a dictionary of shortcut to locations

Use Emacs interactive ability to select a shortcut name and open its location with Dired.

The dictionary was easy once I got familiar with the alist syntax:

1

("dev_seamonkey"."g:/code/projects/my-projects-pre-change/seamonkey")

Now to just add a list of those guys (one for each shortcut) to my shorcuts alist.